SO yep!

What did you like? What didn't you like?! What made the event awesome for you? What would be awesome if we did next time?

we appreciate both positive and negative, as both will get us to make better events in future

-Tank

I posted my opinion in the computer chair thread below this, mainly because they were my biggest annoyance

R4N needs to not yell into the mic
CS commentary can diaf
Music on the PA can also diaf

The sound of 400 dirty leechers makes for a quite dull atmosphere.

A dull atmosphere is not something we want.

The music is kept relatively quiet (when it's played at all) so you can easily drown it out with headphones or conversation.

God damn that CSS commentary was the lamest thing ive heard, ever!

Id have to say one of the most annoying things at the lan was peoples lack of patience and manners.
We had one guy setting up fairly late and he was clearly having a tough time. Instead of approaching us and being polite and asking nicely he decided to;

1. ask us to move our chairs with so much attitude it pretty much insured we got in his way everytime.
2. proceeded to barge past us knocking everyone in his way. Fair enough by this point because we had started to take up all the room lol.
3. Go cry to the admins like a 5 year old.
4. Then once we had been, finally, asked politely by the admin to move he doesnt walk past us for ages!

Was a good laugh for us in the end.

Respawn was all in all awesome again. Thanks to the great admins.

Personally, as a catch up with mates and a fun place to be i loved it.

There were a couple of areas i think you're getting weak on though, the gaming was non exsistant, and although it is up to the players to game it is up to the admins to make the atmosphere and the general gaming mood happen.

The volume is set by someone in the admin area, who is not near any of the pa speakers.

Late on Sunday it was so loud I had to leave my pc.

We enjoyed, Loosing the spot in line to move our cars out to the main road,
Being told to unload from there, To loose our spot in the line and stand outside with out gear in the rain.
After being told we'd be pushed through because of it. But wasn't.
Especially considering one of us is disabled and we had a disabled sticker on the car.

Enjoyed being told by a cod4 team never to come back, over and over in the server chat during the comp.

Enjoyed missing comps because not a single one was on time or you'd get misleading info from the schedule to the teams page or direct from admin.

Loved the constant threats to damage other peoples property by admin, Great form.

One of the people who was meant to be gaming with us, Ordered some hoodies and a shirt, However due to the rain and the situation above, his system was covered in water, so he went home to dry out his gear instead.
Later he was called up on the PA, so one of us went down to talk to them about it.
Obviously we had to arrange the cash, When we did, We found out in the end that the admin had given the hoodies away.

I believe we spoke to you directly and advised that provided you had that disabled sticker there was no concerns with you parking there. Once we were made aware of your sticker, that was the end of it. In future we would appriciate via a PM to one of the key admins that you have a disability, and we'll make sure that provisions are made such that problems like these do not arise.



This is most concerning and I have added it to special list.

As i explained yesterday, i was firstly told that he didn't want them, so gave one of them away. The someone said he did want it, but the one set aside had dissapeared. The was told he would want the shirt, so set it aside. then was told that one of your guys needed to go to the ATM for money, so i waited, and no one ever came back for the shirt.

I did apologise profusely at the time, but please be aware that it wasn't completely my fault in this situation, and i was only acting on the information given to me.

Not a single person spoke to me about it. Just the demand to move our cars or we would be stuck out in the rain.
As for the shirts, I was there during our first contact regarding them. You were told we had to contact him about them, We had no idea he had even ordered them.

Good afternoon everyone,

Since this was the 1st LAN I have attended as a gamer, I must admit it opened my eyes to a lot of things, good and bad.

First, I'll start with the "bad".



Unless there was other comments made while I was out of the hall, I think this comment relates to the announcement made by Zardoz about someone having a virus on their system, and when he finds it he'll toss it outside. Whether he meant it or not, I do not know, but I found myself concerned and in turn running virus scanners on my system to make sure it wasn't me.

Some of the language shouted across the hall over the weekend which was directed at other players/teams may have been in the heat of the moment, but I felt it may be unwarranted. Try to remember that there are young people in the room and hey, it's just a game. Sure there was prize money up for grabs, but that doesn't mean foul language needs to be shouted.

More to follow, I'm sure.

Now, onto the "good".

Since I was getting around on crutches, mobility was limited at best for me. I have never been to an event where admins and/or players have made sure that things were pointed out to me, such as location of disabled toilets etc. This was much appreciated.

Just about everyone I spoke to over the weekend were very friendly, and made the event more enjoyable.

To all the admins, I thank you for putting in so much hard work each and every time to bring us this event. I cannot even begin to imagine how stressful the "behind the scenes" side of things is, and I think everyone should show u all some appreciation.

Tank, never before have I seen such a person with a passion for what they do. You seemed to be on the go the whole weekend, just like the energiser bunny, never giving up. If it wasn't for you, and the rest of the admin team, these events would be much worse off, if even running at all.

I'm sure I'll think of something else to add in the near future.

I can't wait for Respawn V17.

--Shub0xx.

The Quake3 Tournament needs to be run at a reasonable hour.
6am to start a comp is just silly. It only takes 1.5 hours to run so i'm sure it could be slotted in somewhere without interfering with the other cash comps.
I had people waiting hours and hours for it to happen so i could drive them home.

Annoucements, while essential for some things, were very distracting when playing in comps that relied on sound. Particuarly when trying to balance Game sounds with hearing your teammates in real life.
To be honest i don't have a direct solution to this but some announcements could be delivered visually on the projector combined with the respawn notifier application.

The big desk chairs are rather anoying when people are leaning back on them, particuarly when trying to get your equipment in/out. navigating your way through is quite anoying, and i am sure it is anoying for the people i am constantly bumping. most people were good and didn't lean back too far but some were flying business class on a A380.

Otherwise most gaming servers were lag free and main tournaments ran well.
Thanks for the efforts involved Admins

+1 for high back chairs being annoying.

People should be required to lock them upright so they can't lean back covering at least half the aisle.
It still gives them comfort, and leaves a bit more room for people to get through without bumping into them too much.

This is just a general discussion point and not directly related to v16 but more to Respawn itself.

It frustrates me that Respawn has turned into a massive Leech fest where it seems only 40% or so come to play games. In my previous threads I've been told Respawn isn't going to be "competition focused" and that people come for the "LANning atmosphere/party", in other words, leech a shitload and maybe catchup with a few onlines mates.

In posting this, I know I will get flamed by the Respawn veterans that come to respawn just to leech. But I'd really like to see Respawn become more gaming focused because it has so much potential.

i know how you feel, this has been a primary focus for me and squid for awhile, and a big part in increasing the prize money to get more people involved.

in regards to comps, this is a side affect of me trying todo so much that i get bogged down whilst other gets pushed aside, if anyone thinks they can help and has experiance in the area, please let me know, id like to bring more people on board

thanks

Just to put this into perspective, the virus in question (Conficker) is capable of bringing down the entire network even with only one or two infected computers, and there's no easy way to work out whose computer it is. Of course he's not going to destroy someone else's property that's worth thousands of dollars, but considering the fact that this virus has caused problems at the last 4 events and that it's entirely possible to literally totally ruin the entire event as a result of nothing but one person's LAZINESS, I think he was actually quite civil about it.

Incidentally, Conficker's ability to cause damage isn't something that can be easily dealt with by reconfiguring the network; it remains a major and serious cause of damage to corporate networks. Even Microsoft have offered a $250,000 reward for any information leading to the arrest of the virus's creator(s).

What type of stuff? I know you guys get bogged down with stuff even with people just not being able to get on the network/being able to access a game.

I love respawn and wouldn't mind helping in any way I could.

Oooh, had I known it was that nasty bugger, I'd've understood completely. I've had issues with Conflicker in the past, with it bringing down corporate networks that I've been working on, so I understand his concern.

I'll put my hand up to help in any department that needs extra assistance.

I wish i was 18 and had p's because i want to come down earlyer and help out if i was permitted by the admin staff.

But deadman if u need help me and/or sharks will be willing to help out any way possible.

but overal it was pretty epic and i enjoyed the lan... and to whomever i pissed off with my chair in the annexe i apologise...

I might suggest that the player limit be reduced back to 450 players because theres not much room with 500... and only 407 people checked in so?

This is a really difficult topic to deal with and my experience with lanning has mostly told me that there's nothing that any individual person or group can really do about it. In the time I've been attending, the admin team have tried just about everything to get people to play more games at various times (reminding them over the PA to play something, starting specific games and asking people to join, holding more competitions, holding competitions with bigger prizes/cash prizes, etc) and to be honest I don't think there is any correlation whatsoever between these activities and the number of people who enter into the comps.

The most ridiculous moment of the LAN was when TF2 was about to start with a $300 prize and only a single team had entered. People were so averse to playing a reasonably popular and well-liked game (that has previously had a substantial number of serious teams entering) that they were essentially giving up a significant amount of free money. Then there are other games at other LANs which were barely promoted and had almost no prize and got a dozen teams or players entering - but the events before and after that got nothing.

I think the whole thing has more to do with the zeitgeist than the actions of the admins or individual players: a LAN is a social event and interest in the activities that go on within it naturally waxes and wanes over time. The reason Respawn isn't a competition focussed LAN is because most of the players don't seem to really want that, and the admins trying to go against that isn't going to help anyone.

Extreme LAN is an interesting example because they put a lot of work into actively pursuing people running filesharing and shutting down hubs etc. The practical upshot of this was that not only did the quality of the LAN suffer but there was still just as many people filesharing, and even those that did give up on it still didn't play games. That's just one of the things people are interested in, and IMO telling them to be interested in something else is futile and unproductive. Sucks, but that's life.

There are ways for admins to "police" filesharing, by blocking ports etc, but most of the time this doesn't work because when 1 port gets blocked, the hub "creator" can just pick another random port and continue sharing.

I know for certain I'd hate to be the one trying to shut down ports to block filesharing, because that's all I'd be doing all weekend, rather than having a good time playing games.

Yeah, that's kind of what I was getting at. Even then, that can cause performance problems on the switches, and even the most complicated and performance-crippling filtering system will still be quite easy to get around (wouldn't life be great if Conroy understood this?)

My point wasn't to block filesharing.

I understand that around 95%+ of the people that come Respawn fileshare, regardless if they play games or not.

My idea is to promote a larger population of Respawn who actually come to play games and compete in the competitions. My initial idea was to adjust the signup so that it is easiar for teams to get into Respawn and actually compete in the comps (this idea was highly debated in another thread).

It really is a confusing situation and I guess it really is up to the admins to decide what to do from here.

As for Respawn 16, I really enjoyed it. Another successful event with a great CoD4 comp.

My dislike was the shoutcasting over the PA. Yea I enjoyed GameStah casting the CS Final, but not everyone wants to hear it, especially when I'm playing the COD finals. It would be better if you could broadcast the shoutcast over the network (maybe through VLC somehow?). Same goes for the cast over the PA for the COD Grand Final.

For someone who has never really played CS, I had no idea what they were talking about, and then at times all I could hear was a mumble.

I like the thought of broadcasting thru VLC. That way those who want to watch/listen can, and those who don't really care don't need to listen to the commentary.

How would a small chill-out lounge work, with a small seperate PA system set up so that people who wanted to watch/listen could go and sit down, watch it and hear the commentary?

I come to leech but I love the games like Tron. Its easy to jump into while your system is being taxed by DC++.

my GF was disappointed by the chick comp. next time she'd like to see a games list before the event. She didnt even have the games installed so couldnt play.

That sounds like a possible solution. If I may make a suggestion, put up a poll on this question, and let it run until a month b4 the next respawn, allowing the admin team to guage a response from members.

This gives you all time to make the needed arrangements if required.

Wasn't there a source tv network setup for exactly this sort of thing? If not there's no reason why the cs commentary can't be done over vlc or something like than..

One thing that really annoys me is steam, I actually love steam- but its barely works half the time on lans. It actually worked fine for me this time, but countless people seemed to be having problems. Get some more internet access

Overall it was an alright event, atmosphere was a bit dull at times D:

Steam is usually the users fault when they don't take a minute to boot their computer up, let steam offer to run in offline mode, run it, then plug their machine in. The games do LAN in offline mode...

Sharks, the system is far from perfect. I've been lanning since Steam before steam was introduced.. I don't think I've been to a lan where there's been no problems with steam... It should work a lot better than it does.

Yes. It has come into the venue before and whilst we can attempt to trace the source, it sends out packets of data that have spoofed information so its a pain the backside to catch. But thankfully a quick thinking admin put the conficker patches and repairs on the FTP for people to grab and confirm their machine was not the leading cause of issues. I can assure you the "RAGEBOAT" issue is a hot button one and one that will be discussed at length. We really thank you guys for being so blunt and honest with us. Without this, I know that from a group point of view, we'd never know whats wrong.

Cheers

I for one come to Respawn to file share and play small games like Tron, you really think banning file sharing even though its probably not possible is going to help your cause?

I'm sure there are alot of people like me out there

I really really wish this was the case. The only time I'm leeching at Respawn is because I can't find anything I want to play at that time, and am probably bored of Tron by that point. Obviously for a lot (most?) people leeching is the big drawcard, and what mainly if not exclusively for. It just saddens me because this is the biggest, most regular and successful LAN in Victoria, and maybe Australia (dno about fragfest/SGL). With such huge numbers and such a capable admin team, you can see so much potential for competitions, but relatively little results despite their efforts.

One big question I have is about internet games and how this can be approached. Someone mention using Steam offline in this thread, but I was under the impression that you guys opened a port or something to allow limited net access for steam to work? With games like MW2, BFBC2 and soon what will be one of the biggest competitive games around, SC2, all requiring some form of online access, is there any way the net can be set up through the uni so that bandwith is allocated specifically to allow these games to run? Otherwise I fear some of the great existing and upcoming games will never see the light at Respawn, and we'll be playing TF2, COD4 and WC3 for longer than we might wish.

whilst we try to allow steam access to login at the LAN, it gets fairly hard have 400 odd ppl loggin in over either 3g or a 768k connection, and this is where most of the problems occur afaik.

ill be taking down all of your suggestions for our next meeting, if there is anything else please PM me.

Read a little more carefully . I'm not saying there are staff who want to block filesharing, but the fact that it is simply not technically possible means that that doesn't even matter.

Read that again They've tried everything under the sun to promote the competitions (and more gaming in general) and there still seems to be absolutely no relationship between these efforts and the number of people who actually participate.

The team signup idea does sound like a very nice convenience and something that is definitely worth bringing up, but I do doubt that it would change the general direction of the LAN (short of turning it into something like AusHalo where you have to be in a team to register, but that wouldn't work nearly as well for a BYOPC/PC LAN as it does for an XBox one).

People could have/should have spammed their games/servers on the forums.

I always get the desire to play games like SA-MP at respawn but never get around to installing it/not sure about the server files. People enjoy mindless violence. It allows for people to play/game/get involved but still enjoy other aspects whilst not needing a beasty computer to run GTA4/Saints Row 2.

I think if people knew how appealing/fun games like Flatout 2 were, they would actually take 30 minutes to play it and maybe even enter the fun comp. (I orginially joined the competition for Flatout2 but had to pull out so I could go to the shops)

Was good trip.
No real down points, though I would like to see more non-gaming based comps or random prizes.
Admins did a good job having to put up with everyone's crap.

OK first things first, this is the best LAN in Australia.

Ok now the yelling abuse across the hall is not uncalled for but still probably should not happen. A lot of teasing and name calling happens online, so when it comes to real life of course there is going to be some *pay back*.

As for the shout casting i think it is a good thing to have that makes games slightly more interesting for a someone that knows the game and a lot more for people that done. I think that the showing it like you do the TV other the intranet would be a awesome idea .

Gamers vs Leechers. As for this a few people i talk to every LAN *not mentioning names there just 2 of the biggest file sharers there* are playing games all the time. They set up make a list to DL and let people leech. There always playing something like CSS or any kind of game for that matter. Proving you dont just need to sit there listening to music or watching movies but you have to enjoy games for that...

As for the big gaming fans Dead_man, 666 and myself are all working together on something big. Lets just say very big we will keep you posted gamers.

The CS competition was the best thing there, you are a moron if you hate gamestah volunteering for it.

We have three options in regards to Steam.

• Block it entirely
• Allow authentication, no downloads
• Allow all Steam ports

Options 1 and 3 are not viable. 1, because Steam is horrible. 3, because we just don't have the badnwidth for everyone to forget about (or just abuse) those Steam downloads.

We use option 2, because then people can actually log on in a reasonable amount of time. However, if your Steam client isn't up to date, or as with the beta it decides it wants to update all of the time, you get issues. Which is why we always remind you to update Steam before you come.



And this is why the rest of the LAN sit there on DC++ - because they have huge shares. The sharers are playing games because they've already got everything they want, or know what else they want. The leechers spend an hour going through each list of the big sharers looking for stuff, then wait for it to finish, then go home, maybe playing Tron in the middle.



This is entirely the point of the FunComps - regular (ish) small games that are easy to pick up, to encourage people such as yourself to get in a game and play.

We realise not everyone wants to play in the major comps, but it really is disappointing for us when no one wants to play, even in the small fun games that are free, legal to share and awesome fun.

I wanted me some Plain Sight LAN action but it was not too be. Too late of a release for it to get recognised
Glorious game though.

Me too, dude. Me too.

Pity I only got it the night before, and didn't get a chance to analyse it and figure out the ports we need - there's no documentation on their site about it

Next event!

I knew you'd have wanted to play it too. Can't go past suicidal ninja robots (unless it's a suicidal ninja robot wearing a Godzilla hat and has a flaming sword)!

I await eagerly for the next event then.

I do apologize for the un-organisation of the chick comp, and ending up having it not run due to personal circumstances.

it will definately be better done next time

many apologies.

Main reason why I drove 5hours to the event!

Anyway, Respawn was a very good experience and I enjoyed myself and shall be looking forward to it's future events
Kudos to the Respawn Team on the event.

P.S.
PLEASE HAVE THE CHICK COMP NEXT TIME FOR CHARD!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Knowing you actually came around asking the girl players with us to join. You should be happy that you do so much for respawn.

p.s thanks for my warm hoodie :3

Would just like to thank Tank for all the effort put in to the Respawn apparel line. Lab coat and hoodie are awesome. Super big think you for finding them in my size!


P.S. I finally remembered something to grumble about. AIR CONDITIONING AT 4AM. WTF?!